The Windermere Witness (17 page)

‘Was he a friend of the family, then?’ she asked.

‘Sort of. His mother was Mummy’s aunt’s foster sister.’ She smiled faintly. ‘It was years before I got that straight. We always just said we were cousins, when I was little. But there’s no blood connection. It got important to say that. Of course, Adelaide is my mother-in-law now. That’s a bit weird.’

‘Was she at the wedding?’

‘Oh yes. But she’s quite old now, and deaf. She still doesn’t really understand what’s happened. She loved Markie,’ she added sadly. ‘He used to go and talk to her in her little house. They played canasta together sometimes. She always won, apparently.’

Simmy was slowly understanding that Bridget no more wanted her impressions of Markie than did Peter or Glenn or Felix or Pablo. She wanted to reminisce without
argument or interruption. She had lost a beloved brother, and nobody could tell her anything about him that she didn’t already know – or thought she knew.

‘He was with all the other men,’ she offered. ‘They all seemed very chummy together.’

‘What? Oh – on Saturday, you mean. Yes, I know. They were waiting for Daddy.’

‘Hang on,’ Simmy interrupted. ‘If Markie was living with your father, how come they hadn’t seen each other for weeks? Why didn’t they go to the wedding together?’

Bridget waved an impatient hand. ‘Markie was travelling. He was supposed to start school again this term, but he never showed up. That’s why everybody was so cross with him.’

‘I see,’ lied Simmy.

Bridget inhaled sharply, and burst out: ‘But what the hell
happened
out there? They all went back into the hotel to get changed, and Markie stayed outside. Then somebody killed him. And we had the wedding without him. It’s just those facts that keep going round and round in my head.’

‘And mine.’

‘So who killed him? It must have been a man. All the women who knew him were upstairs with me. My mother, the bridesmaids, even Adelaide came in for a bit.’

‘Peter’s mother?’ Simmy was valiantly keeping track of the family, hoping there wouldn’t be any more new names to memorise.

Bridget nodded, with an exaggerated grimace. ‘She insists I call her Mother now. She’s an old witch most of the time, but you have to admire her.’ Simmy heard this as a worn-out phrase, probably used about the old lady
from Peter and others. She very much doubted that Bridget lost any sleep over what Adelaide Harrison-West thought of her.

‘There are too many people,’ she complained. ‘Wanda. Penny – now Adelaide.’

‘Wanda’s got some bug – sounds quite bad. And Penny wouldn’t come to my wedding, would she? Not only would my mother kick up a fuss, but Penny hates Peter.’

‘She hates Peter? Why?’

Bridget heaved a sigh. ‘It was because he let Markie fall off a horse, when he was fifteen. That’s how she saw it, anyway. He broke his arm in two places. She said he couldn’t go to Peter’s ever again, but she couldn’t stop him. Markie just packed his rucksack and got the train by himself. She was absolutely furious when Peter refused to send him home again.’

It was, Simmy presumed, the same incident that George Baxter had told her about. It had plainly left quite an impression on the whole family. And it was in the comparatively recent past. The emotions involved would still be warm and raw. But the boy’s own mother was surely unlikely to have killed him and his father for motives somehow associated with the story.

‘Does Peter know you’re here?’ she wondered suddenly.

The girl bristled. ‘Why should he? He’s my husband, not my jailer. I’m free to see who I want to.’

‘So that’s a no,’ nodded Simmy.

‘What if he doesn’t? He’s been so foul to me, he doesn’t deserve to be consulted.’

‘He’s probably worried.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘I’m assuming you do love him? In spite of his being foul?’

‘Worship him,’ Bridget said simply. ‘Always have. All he has to do is look into my eyes, and I turn to jelly. He created me, the person I am now. He always listened to me, and took me about with him, and read my mind. I read his, as well. We are totally soulmates. Nothing’s ever going to change that.’

‘Not even two murders?’

‘I hope not,’ whispered Bridget, tears running down her face.

Simmy was reaching for the box of tissues she had learnt to keep handy, when the door flew open, the bell above it clanging wildly. ‘There you are!’ cried a man. ‘For God’s sake, we’ve been going frantic.’

It was Pablo, the usher. His eyes were two black holes and his skin seemed several shades darker than before. He rushed at Bridget, and gripped her by the arm. ‘You little fool. What do you think you’re playing at?’

‘Hey!’ Simmy protested. ‘Let go of her.’

‘Get off me,’ Bridget added, with a shake.

The man subsided and took a step back. He swept a hand across his brow. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘But we thought … why didn’t you say where you were going?’

‘Why should I?’

‘Because, you stupid girl, there have been two murders and nobody can assume they’re safe. Somebody’s got it in for your family, that’s obvious. So what are we meant to think if you just disappear?’

‘You’re telling me that Peter’s actually
worried
?’ Bridget gave Simmy a quick complicit grin. ‘That’s amazing.’

‘Glenn, Felix – all of us. It was Glenn who realised you were missing.’

‘I’m
not
missing. How did you know to come here for me?’

‘I didn’t. I saw a woman I know, out in the street, and asked if she’d seen you. She said she had – that you’d come in here half an hour ago.’

Bridget shuddered. ‘I must be famous, then, am I? Everybody recognising me. That’s a horrible feeling.’

‘So stay at home, damn it,’ he snarled. ‘Where they can’t see you.’

‘I bloody well won’t.’ The tears were returning, this time born more of frustration than grief, thought Simmy.

‘You bloody well will, until the killer’s caught. Peter’s going to make you. You didn’t even have your phone on,’ he finished with a final fatal accusation.

‘Well, she’s perfectly safe,’ Simmy pointed out. ‘So you can calm down now.’ For the first time he gave her a proper look, followed by a half smile.

‘It’s you,’ he said. ‘Sorry – that sounds stupid. But I didn’t stop to think. Bridget’s so precious, you see. “Peter’s princess”, we call her. Thanks for watching out for her. You seem to be a very useful person, one way and another.’

She returned his look, lingering on his long eyelashes and shadowed jaw. He appeared not to have shaved for a day or two. His clothes were rumpled. She tried to put herself in his place: the glamour of the wedding obliterated by violence and suspicion and shattered plans. His friendship with the others, which had probably been based on easy male jocularity spiced with a light competitiveness, had been thrown into something far deeper and darker. How were they managing it? Were they eyeing each other warily, conscious that one of them might be a killer? Even Felix could in theory have wielded a gun on Sunday morning, despite his disability.

‘I’m not sure I want to be “useful”,’ she demurred.

‘Of course you do. Everybody does.’

‘Hmm,’ was all she could think to say to that. ‘All I did was deliver the flowers. It seems as if I was just sucked in from there on. I don’t even understand why, really.’

Bridget gave her a pat on the arm. ‘You were useful to Mummy. You minded Lucy for her on Saturday. And she thinks you would have been useful to Daddy, as well, if only …’ she faltered.

Simmy found herself thinking about George Baxter’s death for the first time since Bridget had come into the shop. It had all been about Markie. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I doubt it, actually.’

‘You’re a brilliant listener, anyway.’

Pablo took charge. ‘Come on then, Bridge. I’ll have to take you back. Peter’s calling the police about you being missing. It’s going to be a bit of a mess. We’d better go and explain ourselves.’

‘That’s so
stupid
,’ Bridget wailed. ‘Nobody said I couldn’t go out.’

‘Nobody thought you’d be such a fool. At least you should have had your phone on.’

Simmy began wondering just how unusual the whole set-up was. Bridget was obviously a highly peculiar eighteen-year-old in more ways than she’d grasped so far. Wasn’t it congenitally impossible for them to sever the lifeline of the mobile, even for five minutes?

‘The phone’s still at Mummy’s. I left it there on Saturday. I didn’t think I’d need it during the wedding.’

‘Okay. That makes sense,’ he conceded. ‘We’ll go and fetch it, now, on the way up to Ambleside.’

‘I’ve got my car. I’m not coming with you.’

‘What?’ He frowned at her. ‘What car?’

‘The one Peter gave me as a wedding present. Remember? It’s up by the church. I was thinking I might take it down to Newby Bridge and back, to give myself some time to think.’

‘But it’s not insured yet. You weren’t meant to drive it till after the honeymoon.’

‘Well I did,’ she defied him. ‘Because the honeymoon’s been cancelled, remember?’

They were spitting at each other like sparring cats, the man acting far younger than his actual age. Simmy felt her whole attention engaged by them, and by the challenge of understanding everything about them. She wanted to know the whole history, the way they fitted together, the assumptions they made about each other. It was impossible and imperative, all at the same time. She had no right to question them, or even to expect them to acknowledge her existence beyond this moment. And yet Bridget had sought her out, and begun an extensive explanation of her life and the people in it. They had been interrupted just as light had begun to fall on some of the more crucial aspects.

Pablo’s shoulders slumped, and he shook his head helplessly. ‘It’s too much for us,’ he sighed. ‘For any of us. There are no rules for something like this. It’s just panic and chaos for everyone. Come on, now. You can drive, and I’ll sit in with you. I’ll get my motor later on. But I’ve got to call Peter and tell him I’ve found you. I should have done it before now.’

With his phone clamped to his ear, he moved automatically to the front of the shop. Bridget followed him meekly, and they went outside together. ‘Bye, then,’
called Simmy, suppressing the flash of offence she felt at being so readily abandoned. Surely she hadn’t been meant to report Bridget’s presence, as if she’d been a lost child?

There were entirely too many of these young adults under her care, she felt. Ben Harkness was another one. And she wondered belatedly whether she ought to have checked with Melanie’s mother before letting her stay overnight with her. Melanie was almost twenty, but she did still live at home, and people did worry about daughters, whatever their age.

Except Eleanor, perhaps. Bridget’s mother had expressed scarcely a flicker of anxiety for her older girl, in Simmy’s hearing. There had been a distance between them each time Simmy had seen them together. Even in the bridal suite, before the wedding, Eleanor had been absent from her post, when the flowers were delivered.

Left on her own, she swung between thinking the entire collection of Baxters, Harrison-Wests and their entourage were beyond weird and then deciding that they were really quite normal. They were simply reacting to a situation that was far beyond anybody’s experience. They were bound to be scared, stunned, irrational. And Pablo was undeniably beautiful. His image still shimmered before her eyes, startling her for a number of reasons. Since Tony had let her down, she had scarcely acknowledged the existence of men in the world. And now, here she was, suddenly feeling stirrings at the sight of a swarthy Spaniard who might very well be a murderer.

Melanie had carelessly remarked that she would, of course, stay Tuesday night at Simmy’s as well. ‘After all, there’s no point in only doing it for one night, is there?’ she added.

‘So when do we stop?’

‘When they’ve caught the killer, of course.’

‘But that might be
months
. You’re not proposing to move in permanently, are you?’

‘It’s an incentive, then,’ said Mel. ‘For us to make sure it’s all sorted quickly.’

‘We’ll talk about it properly this evening,’ Simmy had said firmly.

Tuesday evening turned dramatically wet and windy, and Melanie phoned to say her car wouldn’t start. ‘It’s the head gasket,’ she reported mournfully. ‘It won’t be driveable until it’s fixed. My brother’s not happy. Says I’ve got to sort it, as if it was
my
fault.’

‘And you can’t use the bike in this weather.’

‘Well, I
can
, but my mum isn’t too happy about it.’

‘No, Mel, I won’t let you, either. I’ll be absolutely fine here on my own. What self-respecting murderer is going to come up here with it like this? I’m locking all the windows and closing the curtains, and forgetting all about it.’

‘Well, be careful, then,’ said Mel reluctantly. ‘You should get yourself a dog.’

‘Don’t you start,’ said Simmy and put the phone down.

It rang again ten minutes later. ‘Is that the right number for Ms Brown?’ came a youthful voice.

‘Is that you, Ben?’

‘Right. Listen. Wilf – you remember Wilf?’

‘Your brother, who works at Storrs. I remember.’

‘Yeah. Well, he went back today, for the lunches, and he’s just got home. The police forensics people only packed up this afternoon. Guess what – they’ve been going through the rooms of the groom and the best man and all the ushers. It’s been a real pain, obviously, for the hotel, not being able to use those rooms. They must be collecting hair and skin and fingerprints. Like in those Jeffrey Deaver books – you know?’

‘Sorry. Never heard of them.’

‘It’s all about forensics. Amazing what they can find. I might go in for that myself,’ he added thoughtfully. ‘Do you watch
Bones
?’

‘No, Ben. You asked me that before.’

‘Did I? Sorry. There’s a character called Zack, in the early series—’

‘Ben, don’t tell me about it now. Get me the DVD and maybe I’ll watch it, if it isn’t too gruesome.’

‘It’s
very
gruesome. That’s what’s so good about it.’

‘Storrs,’ she prompted.

‘Right. Yes. So the police obviously suspect one of the men in the wedding party. They haven’t been nearly so thorough about the women. I guess there aren’t proper alibis for the men. They all say they went back to their room to change for the ceremony, and as they were all in single rooms, nobody can vouch for them.’

‘Is that what Wilf thinks?’

‘It’s what they
all
think. And get this – there’s a rumour that Markie wasn’t hit on the head at all. He was just held down in the lake until he drowned.’

‘A rumour? Where did it come from?’

‘I don’t know. But it’s bad, isn’t it?’

‘The person would be soaking wet. And there’d have been lots of noise and splashing.’ She thought again of young Markie and his conspiratorial smile. ‘It’s horrible.’

‘There wouldn’t have been anybody out there in the rain to hear.’

‘We don’t know that for sure.’

‘But if it was somebody from the wedding party who did it, it must have been well before the ceremony got going – the person would have had to go and get dry and then change, and be ready to do his ushering or whatever.’

‘Do they think the same person killed Mr Baxter?’

‘I dunno. It’s a very different MO.’

‘MO?’

‘Modus operandi. Don’t you
ever
watch crime stuff, or read the books?’

‘Sadly not. I prefer chick lit or historical romances. I realise I’m being very disappointing.’

‘You’re not a very good amateur detective,’ he told her kindly. ‘But I’m sure you must have useful skills, all the same.’

‘The Moxon man seems to think so. He said I see the big picture.’

‘There you are then!’ he crowed. ‘That’s great.’

‘Is it? I’m not so sure. It just seems so terribly wicked and sad and cruel. Bridget came to see me in the shop today, and she’s in an awful state. Then Pablo, one of the ushers, came and fetched her. It was all fairly weird.’

‘What?’ His voice shook with excitement. ‘You’ve actually
seen
one of the main suspects. This
afternoon
?’

‘You mean Pablo? Surely not. He’s so …’ she couldn’t say
beautiful
to a boy of seventeen ‘… nice,’ she finished weakly.

‘Obviously he’s a suspect. His room was being searched. He had the same opportunity as the others.’

‘More than Felix you mean?’

‘Who?’

‘The one in the wheelchair. That really just leaves Peter and Glenn, doesn’t it? Unless it was somebody else entirely. Some passing stranger. Someone on the hotel staff. We can’t assume it was one of the wedding party.’

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘I think we probably can, you know.’ A woman’s voice could be heard calling Ben’s name. ‘Okay, Ma,’ he shouted. ‘Gotta go now. Feels like good progress to me. I can come in after school tomorrow, maybe? Around four. Bye now.’

Good progress?
she repeated to herself. What were they actually doing? Was it any more than idle speculation, with no real involvement or input?

Outside, the weather was behaving with increasing violence, tossing trees on all sides. Something near the top of the house was rattling. The capacity for the elements to dominate the lives and moods of every living creature, including human beings, was new to Simmy. She had always lived in comfortable huddles with other buildings, unnaturally warm and sheltered. This northern exposure was altogether different. The houses were certainly solid, darkly resisting the gales, but there was alarmingly little between one’s naked body and the caprices of the climate. She found herself giving more and more thought to the subject, alternating between exhilaration at the challenge, and dread of finding herself out in the snow one night, quietly freezing to death.

Perhaps it was this perception of disproportion between what a single person might achieve, compared to the power of strong wind and lashing rain, that reduced any lurking fear of an attacker to almost zero. Even a bullet would be blown off course by such a gale as this.

There was work, as always, that she could be doing. The flowers for the christening were a priority, along with the need to put into practice her Halloween ideas. There had been a surprising realisation in the first few months in the shop of just how soothing and fulfilling floristry could be. Every job she was asked to do came wrapped in warm emotions. People sent flowers out of love, primarily. Even those ordered from feelings of guilt implied reconciliation and forgiveness. They were redolent of congratulation, welcome, sympathy and romance. The reality of this had quickly convinced Simmy that there was no better line of work she could have chosen. She sometimes wondered why everybody wasn’t a florist.

All of which only made it more shockingly difficult to grasp the fact of two vicious murders. They could only have been born of hate, revenge, greed or insanity. Cimmerian emotions, bred below the ground, emerging maliciously to destroy people’s lives. She, Simmy, whose name was close to that of the subterranean tribe, strove to remain in the light. The horror of Bridget’s traumatic losses nagged at her insistently.

The rattling was starting to worry her – it seemed to come from the roof. Perhaps a gutter had come loose, she thought, despite the robust workmanship she had taken careful note of when she first acquired the house. Hard local experience had surely guaranteed that builders knew to anchor everything very firmly, from satellite dishes to ridge tiles. The noise of the wind in the trees dominated everything else, but there was definitely something knocking at irregular intervals, overhead. When she went upstairs it got louder, and she eventually tracked it down to a trapdoor into the roof space above the spare room where Melanie had slept the night before, which was lifting and dropping unnervingly, with a loud clatter, presumably as wind found its way inside the roof. That in itself was alarming. Was it meant to do that? If it went on all night, she’d never manage to sleep. Could she stick it down somehow? After some thought she decided to try parcel tape, which so often came in useful.

The ceiling was over eight feet high. She carried a dining chair upstairs to stand on, and just managed to reach far enough to unroll a length of tape and fasten it untidily across the wooden rectangle, fixing it to the wooden edges set into the ceiling. It was awkward, and she had cause to
thank her luck that she was so tall. Anyone shorter than her five foot nine would have needed a ladder.

The noise did not recur, confirming that the trapdoor had been the source. When the gales died down, she decided, she would make a proper inspection of the roof space, to find the hole where the wind had come in. When she bought the house, a surveyor had assured her that everything was well made and unlikely to need any repairs for many years to come. She had never been up there herself. The confined space did not appeal to her in the least. But a quick look with a torch in her first week there had suggested a few boxes and cobwebby shapes left behind by the previous owner. Now, for the first time in many months, she remembered them again.

It had provided a useful little distraction from the murders, at least. The evening was passing easily enough, and soon she would take herself to bed with her Tudor romance and forget that she might in theory be the target of a crazed killer. You could get used to anything, she had discovered, and living alone was not particularly difficult to adapt to after a few months. Tony had not been especially talkative, after all, and the absence of the relentless sports commentary from TV and radio that he had listened to all the time was a blessing. One or two friends had asked her what was the most upsetting part of their break-up, and she had been hard-pressed to describe what she most missed. ‘The idea of myself as half of a couple,’ she said. Or ‘Having another body in the bed for the warm company it provides.’ Both were true, and important, and yet they sounded feeble when spoken aloud.

But she had got past all that. Now she simply carried
inside her a hard nugget of rage against Tony for his betrayal and weakness. She still dreamt of attacking him, generally verbally, shouting until her throat was dry, but once, in a dream, she knifed him, plunging the razor-sharp stiletto between his ribs. She had never confessed this to a soul, and did her best to deny it even to herself. It had insistently crawled out of its hiding place in recent days, ever since her interview with DI Moxon. When asking herself who amongst the people she had met since then might have committed two murders, she could not avoid the conclusion that it could have been any one of them, because there was a shadow of a chance that she herself might be capable of such an act.

Anyone but Lucy, she amended, with a fond little smile.

Once in bed, however, she found it impossible to sleep. The wind was still raging outside, and her thoughts revolved endlessly around Markie and George, Eleanor and Bridget. Somebody had told her that Markie had been dumped by a girlfriend and been made unhappy as a result. Had anyone told DI Moxon that? Was it significant, anyway? Ben’s eagerness to find evidence was preying on her mind. Surely there could be no prospect of unearthing any physical clues? Which meant they’d have to be content with piecing together items of information that could only be gleaned by talking to people. Or perhaps he envisaged following the main suspects around, scampering from bush to bush with a pair of binoculars. There was certainly no question of interfering with the police investigation, visiting the scenes of the crime and getting in the way.

Her mind was entirely blank when it came to understanding
exactly how a self-appointed amateur detective could even begin to operate. And yet the need was there; the need to avenge poor Markie, and in the process restore to Bridget whatever vestiges of happiness were still possible. She was astonished at the strength of her desire to achieve this. Justice, revenge, morality – whatever word she might apply to her motives was irrelevant. There was something quite comforting in the realisation that her reaction was the same as that of society in general. Killers had to be caught. It was axiomatic. And if young Ben Harkness thought he knew how this might be done, then he was to be encouraged.